Jenny Holzer’s Chilling Paintings Explore Government Abuses During the War on Terror

Artsy Editorial

Sep 10th, 2014 1:47 pm

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Jenny Holzer, an
artist long known for employing the power and presence of words as her primary
tool, has in recent years homed her practice in on language used to conceal and
omit. Best known for bold statements—including her famous “Truisms”—delivered
to audiences in the form of undulating light streams or projected onto public
buildings, Holzer has, over the past decade, taken on a more granular subject,
namely the role of language in the murky ethical force-field that has been the
U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mining declassified government memos whose
sobering details lay bare the abuses of U.S. forces, Holzer transforms these
into semi-abstract silkscreens, with geometric color fields in place of
blotted-out passages of text.

Now, in her “Dust Paintings,” a new
series of works exhibited at Cheim & Read this month—which takes its name from ghubar,
or “dust writing” in English, a form of traditional Arabic calligraphy—Holzer
once again takes as her basis documents obtained through the Freedom of
Information Act. Included are censored texts from the CIA and FBI, and a U.S.
Army Criminal Investigation Report detailing the conditions that led to the
death of an Afghan prisoner, Jamal Naseer, in the custody of the U.S. military,
which Holzer traces and transfers, before turning them into the grounds for
mesmerizing, hand-wrought paintings. Marking a turn for the artist—away from
digital lyricism and back toward painting by hand (where Holzer’s artistic
career began), she recreates these chilling documents in oil-on-linen, in some
cases blowing up fragments of cursive written in broken English by detainees
that read “tortured,” “not guilty,” and “That is whay...Jamal die.”

In Terrorist Group (2013),
patterns of frayed color mimic inky government omissions and suggest terrorist
cells creeping across the picture plane, pointing to a symbiotic relationship
between the U.S. government’s aggressive foreign policies and the spread of
Islamic extremism—which strikes a particularly eerie note in the current
moment. In Assets and Activities 13 (2013), oblong, yellow and blue-gray
blocks of color concealing traces of an underlying document seem to reverberate
with the force of what lies beneath. Accentuating the nefarious patterns and
abstractions embedded in these corrupted documents, Holzer creates a poignant,
symbolic vocabulary for the government’s shady activities and culture of
secrecy, delivering a powerful message with unflinching clarity—what Holzer
does best.